September 27, 2009

Or Python Programmers are Wankers

Good recommendation systems are a win for everyone. But inevitably, they show correlations to undesirable products, and in that sense they also all give condemnations, which sometimes can be quite funny.

Find Your Own

The only trick to finding a juicy “condemnation” is to start with something embarrassing to buy. Amazon has a filtering system, so regardless of how strong the correlation is, it shouldn’t ever show embarassing purchaces from the Learning Python book page. And even for systems without a filter, this approach maximizes your chances of finding something, since every recommendation from a disreputable product is a condemnation.

I’m not sure where the sweet-spot in popularity is for finding a condemnation.

If an item has fewer purchases overall, that should mean that it takes only a few purchases of it and X for X to be recommended. On the other hand, that means fewer items will be recommended from it.

Things can be too popular. Because Amazon only shows up to 100 recommendations, if an item has enough purchases, all of the recommendations from it will be so similar to it, that finding a “deviant” condemnation is impossible. Again I don’t know exactly where this popularity threshold is.